Iran nuclear talks progress, but is it enough to save the deal?

American and Iranian nuclear negotiators are returning to their capitals with the final text of a document to restore the embattled 2015 Iran nuclear deal, after more than 15 months of European Union-brokered diplomacy in Vienna concluded with a final four-day round of talks.

The sudden resumption late last week of negotiations, which had appeared hopelessly deadlocked after a five-month delay, rekindled a glimmer of hope of a return to the landmark deal.

Under the original deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, Iran agreed to strict limits on its nuclear program and forswore pursuing an atomic bomb in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

Yet if the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the nuclear deal is formally called, is restored, it will have overcome soaring, perhaps unsurpassed, levels of mutual distrust.

The negative feedback cycle was triggered by then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal of the United States, and his “maximum pressure” campaign of renewed and expanded sanctions, followed by Iran’s expansion of its nuclear program well beyond the limits of the deal.

If the parties fail to agree now on restoring the deal, analysts say the best result may be a hard-to-sustain cold peace, in which neither side chooses to escalate. Even if that balance is achieved, it would be vulnerable to enduring distrust and potential provocations – compounded by the actions of third parties like Israel, which continues to conduct high-profile assassinations and sabotage inside Iran – that could spark renewed escalation that risks war.

Waiting for answers

Details of the new text remain secret and must be approved by the U.S. and Iran, as well as by China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. EU officials said in Vienna the 25-page final document was the “best possible offer” and a “very good compromise.”

“What can be negotiated has been negotiated,” the EU foreign policy chief, Spain’s Josep Borrell, tweeted Monday.

“Behind every technical issue and every paragraph lies a political decision that needs to be taken in the capitals,” he wrote. “If these answers are positive, then we can sign this deal.”

Such a result seemed highly unlikely even one week ago, for a moribund process beset in Iran by a dramatic political shift to wider hard-line rule that codifies anti-Western sentiment – coupled with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s oft-stated conviction that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal is proof that Americans won’t stick to any deal.

On the U.S. side, President Joe Biden reversed a number of Trump-era rulings in his first days in office, had criticized Mr. Trump’s abandonment of the deal, and had promised a “longer and stronger” agreement that would limit Iran’s missile development and curtail regional activities – steps Iran long rejected.

Yet Mr. Biden waited months before launching efforts to restore the JCPOA and has left many Trump sanctions in place.

According to Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, even before the resumption of talks, all parties were determined to avoid declaring the diplomatic process a failure. Yet, even with the new hint of progress, he says his level of optimism for a deal has increased from 5% last week to just 10% now.

Sticking points remain

Despite the reported development of creative mechanisms to address a multitude of issues on both sides, deadlock remains over questions by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), into decades-old, undeclared traces of human-made uranium particles found at several sites in Iran. The Islamic Republic wants the probe halted.

“It’s true that the negotiators took one step forward and made progress on guarantees and sanctions on [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC] companies, but they remain stuck over the IAEA’s safeguards probe,” says Mr. Vaez.

“Iran doesn’t seem to believe that time and solutions for a breakthrough are exhausted by now,” he adds. “That is why it has allowed so many opportunities for a settlement to slip away.”

“There is plenty of blame to go around; everybody committed mistakes,” says Mr. Vaez. “The Biden administration overlooked how much Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement eroded the little trust the Iranians had in the U.S.’s reliability as a negotiating partner [and] how damaging it was on the Iranian psyche.”

The result for Ayatollah Khamenei is a “fool-me-twice syndrome,” says Mr. Vaez, such that “reputational costs” for his legacy would be damaging to again endorse a nuclear deal if the U.S. can withdraw anytime, without cost.

Hard-line media in Iran have been unrelenting in disparaging any return to a deal they characterized as a giveaway of Iran’s nuclear jewels, with few economic benefits, by a naive, reform-leaning president, Hassan Rouhani.

“The JCPOA is already dead, they just simply refuse to pronounce it so,” wrote hard-line political analyst Alireza Taqavinia last week on the conservative Jomhouriat website.

“There is no trust here at all,” says Nasser Hadian, a professor of political science at Tehran University, who last year presented bridging proposals to senior Iranian officials. They calculate that a restored deal won’t outlast the Biden administration, he says.

Among Professor Hadian’s proposals were several designed to deter a future U.S. pullout from the deal, such as keeping the bulk of Iran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium in the country under IAEA seal and monitoring – instead of excess beyond the 300 kg limit of the deal being shipped abroad, as required by the original JCPOA.

If the U.S. withdrew, Iran would then be able to immediately access that stockpile, which is currently large enough, if further enriched, to theoretically produce several nuclear warheads. Iran says it rejects nuclear weapons as forbidden by Islam, and has no known means of fashioning a warhead, much less delivering one – advances that usually take years.

A verification mechanism would also be created to ensure that economic benefits were being realized, says Professor Hadian, all aimed at “making it more difficult for the next U.S. president to withdraw from the deal.”

Sanctions and stockpiles

From the start, both sides’ demands to restore the deal were unrealistic to the other.

Iran wanted scores of billions of dollars in compensation – Professor Hadian says a “conservative” estimate is $240 billion – for losses incurred by the U.S. pullout, a guarantee that no future American president could again abandon the deal, and the lifting of all sanctions, including removing the IRGC terrorist designation.

The U.S., in its turn, demanded that Iran reverse its violations and put its nuclear genie back in the bottle by once again shrinking its stockpile of nuclear material, mothballing advanced centrifuges, and bringing uranium enrichment levels back down to 3.67% purity – as required in the original JCPOA – after raising them to a new high of 60%, which is a short technical step from weapons-grade 90% purity.

Senior EU officials Monday said “all the questions have been answered in the best possible way” in final draft text that produces economic benefits for Iran, while preserving the nonproliferation goals of global powers.

Seven years ago, then-President Barack Obama announced the nuclear deal, saying it overcame decades of mutual distrust precisely because it was “not built on trust; it is built on verification.”

But both the U.S. and Iran have sizable hard-line factions opposed to any deal, no matter how mutually beneficial. And since the JCPOA was first agreed, politics have shifted on both sides, and Iran’s nuclear advances have made finding a new formula acceptable to all a challenge.

For Iran, “the JCPOA in 2015 was a policy and goal in itself, but in 2022 the JCPOA is a means to achieve a different policy – and that policy is neutralizing sanctions,” says Adnan Tabatabai, head of the Germany-based Middle East think tank CARPO, the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient.

Mr. Tabatabai, who travels frequently to Iran, says Tehran aspires as a “new ambition” to have an economy strong enough to be “immune to the carrots and sticks of sanctions. That means the leadership may deem even a temporary JCPOA restoration worth it to help boost an economy that has been battered by sanctions and mismanagement.

“This negotiating team has to sell it at home as a success, and that success must mean attaining a goodie from the U.S. that compensates for the U.S. ... not giving guarantees,” he says.

“Trust is probably at its lowest level,” he adds. “The JCPOA experience ... has been really catastrophic, and we haven’t really digested, or understood, or acknowledged the scope of how disastrous this has been.”